


I'll walk with you

by TetrodotoxinB



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Catholic abuse, Child Abuse, Fall out from torture and rape, M/M, Panic Attack, Sexual Abuse, alcohol use, referenced past noncon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-24 20:56:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14363490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TetrodotoxinB/pseuds/TetrodotoxinB
Summary: Steve has come home from Korea. While the effects of his time there linger, he's getting better day by day. But some things don't just get better with time and Steve finds out that not all hurts can be powered through. Danny knows what that's like, better than most, and he makes sure that Steve doesn't have to face this alone.





	I'll walk with you

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [SoftObsidian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoftObsidian74/pseuds/SoftObsidian74) for her beta reading.

“I could sleep for a week,” Danny moaned as he kicked the door shut behind himself.

“Yeah, I’m pretty beat myself,” Steve agreed. 

It was bad form and definitely gonna mean cleaning the couch later if they didn’t want it to smell like gunpowder, but they stripped off their vests, gloves, comms, and spare holsters and dropped it all on the sofa. Steve sat down on the coffee table to take off his combat boots and it let out a low groan.

Danny could relate to that coffee table on a personal level, groaning under the weight of too much stuff being placed on it at once, that stuff usually being Steve.

He toed off his loafers which were scuffed again, and began fiddling with the buttons on his shirt, when the table groaned again. Steve stood and slipped his arms around Danny’s waist, rucking up Danny’s shirt as he went, his hands sliding against the bare skin of Danny’s back.

“I know I’ve been a little off since I got back, and I’m sorry I’ve been distant. But, uh, if you’re not busy right now I thought we might head upstairs,” Steve said with one of the smiles that he seemed to reserve just for Danny.

Danny looped his arms around Steve’s neck. “Babe, I thought you were tired.”

Steve shrugged. “I might have a little adrenaline saved up. I think I can manage.”

“Oh, well I’m so glad you can manage. I don’t know how I would make it without you ‘managing.’”

Steve laughed and Danny smiled. He’d always enjoyed making Steve laugh, but after he came back from Korea, there’d been a whole lot less of that. Danny wasn’t trying to blame him. Torture seemed like the kinda thing that would take the wind out someone’s sails, and Steve seemed to being weathering better than anyone else could have. So if it meant that Steve laughed less, Danny wasn’t going to rush him. 

“So is that a yes?” Steve prodded, looking a little like a hopeful, if not lecherous, puppy. 

Danny chuckled. “Yes, babe. That’s a yes.” 

Steve leaned in for a kiss which Danny accepted happily. There was intent, but it was a slow, simmering thing that lacked the urgency of younger years. Slowly they parted, and Danny let himself be led up the stairs to the bedroom. They stripped out of their clothes, Steve being naked by the time Danny had finished with his shirt and the buttons on his slacks, and he pulled the covers back on the bed, and climbed in. Danny put on his best Jersey swagger as he crossed the short space to the bed. 

Steve smiled wide and pulled Danny to the mattress as soon as he got his hands on him. Danny immediately found himself pinned under Steve, who always had to drive — both literally and metaphorically. 

The breath rushed out of Danny as a low moan when Steve began to suck on his neck, just below his ear. Steve moaned in response and Danny’s hips bucked up enough that their cocks rubbed together. Steve moaned again, this time from stimulation, not just appreciation, and his hips followed Danny’s back to the bed, chasing the pleasure.

They made out and dry humped like horny teenagers for a couple of minutes before Danny managed to scrape together enough brain cells to try something else. While Steve was occupied leaving aching marks over his shoulders, Danny sucked a couple of his fingers into his mouth, getting them good and wet. He reached down with his left hand and gripped Steve’s thigh, just on the underside of his ass, and pulled him up the bed a bit. With his right hand he slipped his fingers between Steve’s cheeks and began to rub his hole.

Steve was the taking command type in bed just like in everything else, so Danny more or less expected to bottom tonight like most nights, but Danny knew from experience that a little fingering always got Steve going no matter where the night was headed. 

When the first finger breached, Steve paused what he was doing for a moment. Just long enough for Danny to say, “Oh, it has been a while. Just a little finger’s already got you aching for it, huh?”

Steve huffed a small laugh and bit Danny’s nipple gently in revenge. 

Danny slid his finger in and out, easy as anything. There wasn’t any rush but Danny went ahead and slid the second finger in alongside the first, meeting a small amount of resistance. He scissored his fingers enough to give Steve that slow burn that he liked. Steve said it felt like the ache after a good workout, which Danny thought was ludicrous because there was no such thing as a “good workout” or a “good ache” but nevertheless. Somewhere in the space of that thought, Steve froze. By the time Danny realized that something was well and truly wrong, Steve was out of the bed, down the hall, and Danny heard him throwing up in the bathroom. Danny ran after him, his knee protesting angrily as he dropped to kneel beside Steve at the toilet. 

“Hey, babe. Hey, think you can tell me what’s going on?”

Steve wretched again, though there wasn’t much in his stomach, and spat. Danny stood up and snagged a cup from the sink which he filled with water and handed to Steve. Steve rinsed and spat and handed the cup back with trembling hands. 

Danny unceremoniously dropped the cup in the sink and sat on the floor just out of arm’s reach of Steve. He watched quietly while Steve closed the lid on the toilet and flushed it, before scooting so that his back was against the wall. He ran his hands over his face and sniffled, and Danny wondered what in the fuck could actually make Steve cry. 

He waited a for few minutes during which Steve made two shaky attempts at getting up. Both ended abruptly as Steve’s knees buckled and he ended up right back on the floor. Apparently resigned to the linoleum floor, Steve leaned forward with his head in his hands, sniffling intermittently. Danny watched, not trying to push Steve into anything he didn’t want, but it was apparent that he wasn’t going to speak unless prompted.

“Hey,” he said softly. “I know you’re not feeling so good right now. Think you can tell me what that’s about? I wanna help but I don’t know what’s going on.”

Steve lifted his head and swallowed, looking right past Danny out into the hall. “I don’t know. One minute everything was fine. I think the stuff in Korea hit me harder than I realized.”

Danny’s lips pursed and he nodded slowly. “That is a great explanation, except for the part where it is a complete lie. Steven McGarrett, you cannot expect me to believe you. Because one minute everything was fine, and the next I had my fingers up your ass and you panicked. I’m not saying correlation equals causation. I know that’s a statistical fallacy, but this isn’t math.”

Steve turned his head and finally looked at Danny with bloodshot eyes. “The hell do you want me to say?”

Danny shrugged and waved around at the bathroom. “The truth might, in fact, help.”

“The truth?”

“Yeah, the truth.”

“You wanna know the truth, Danny?” 

“I do,” Danny said with a nod.

“The truth is that I was tortured and I’m having trouble getting over it. I honestly feel that should have been obvious,” Steve snapped.

“The only thing that is obvious here is that something happened that you’re not willing to admit happened. And I get that, Steve, I really do. I know how hard this is, but pretending that it never happened doesn’t actually make it go away.”

“Oh, great. Thanks, Dr. Phil,” Steve shouted as he pulled himself from the floor. “Good to know you’re the leading expert on torture recovery.”

Danny pulled himself up, but let Steve have some space to make it to where he wanted to be first. Cornering someone, someone having a panic attack no less, couldn’t help anything.

The sound of Steve on the stairs was Danny’s cue to snag some board shorts from the bedroom and follow him down. The fridge slammed closed and Danny heard the hiss of an opened bottle. He grabbed himself a beer and followed Steve out to the lanai. 

Steve was wearing some gym shorts and sitting in the lawn chair that he had long ago designated as his, sipping his beer and looking out at the ocean. 

“You’re right,” Danny said as he sat in the chair next to Steve.

When he didn’t qualify that, Steve asked, “About what?”

“That I don’t really know anything about torture. I mean, what happened to me and Grace back in Newark, that was rough but it’s not like torture, not what you went through,” Danny explained.

“Yeah,” Steve agreed quietly, taking another pull from his bottle.

“But what I do know about is rape. I know what you’re going through, even if you’re not willing to say it,” Danny said. He looked over at Steve who had gone motionless in the soft glow coming from the kitchen window.

“Am I wrong?” he asked softly.

Steve looked down at his lap and moved the beer bottle in front of himself where he clasped it in both hands. “No, you’re not wrong,” he answer quietly.

Danny nodded and looked back out at the ocean. Guessing at what happened and knowing were very different things. It almost felt like the stupid ocean was mocking them for being so calm and serene in the face of everything crashing down around them. 

“I’m sorry, Steve. I just want you to know that I love you. This happening, and how ever long you need to get where you want to be with it, those things aren’t going to change that, alright?”

“And what if I can’t get past it? What if what happened tonight is as far as I can ever get without fucking it up? Then what?” Steve asked.

“Woah, hey. One step at a time. Number one: I don’t care about the sex. I mean, I do, you’re great, but I don’t need it. I’ve got you. That’s enough, it’s always been enough. And number two: don’t think it has to be this way forever because it doesn’t, alright? Therapy is a thing that exists. People heal. I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, because right now everything sucks. But it’s not gonna stay that way, okay?”

“How do you know that? You got a degree in psychology you haven’t told me about?” Steve shot back. The anger in his voice was gone though. He sounded tired, resigned. Danny wished that the conversation was over already and he could just reach out and pull Steve into his arms; hug him until they both felt better. 

Danny took a long swallow of his beer and looked back out at the ocean. “I went to Catholic school until tenth grade when I started at a public school. Now I know better, I know that it wasn’t just me, but at the time I felt alone. Father Walters was one of the priests and teachers at the school. I had him for beginners algebra in the seventh grade and I was total shit at math. I started going by his class at lunchtime and after school to get tutoring. It helped, you know, I just needed that extra push. Once I got my footing, I stopped going by, but my grades started slipping again, my parents were threatening to pull me off the JV football team, but I couldn’t figure it out. I mean, I knew the material, I was sure I did, but all the same I started going back to tutoring. 

“Looking back, it’s obvious now that he cooked the books to get me to come back, to keep me coming back, but at the time I really thought it was me. That was when he started the abuse. I didn’t really get it at the time, what all the touching meant. Hands, mouths, genitals, letting him put his fingers in me — I didn’t know. But my grades went up and my parents insisted that I keep going to tutoring, so I did. I went all year, every day I was in school.

“I managed to convince the guidance counselor that I desperately needed to be in religious studies that next year. I was going to be a priest I told her,” Danny recalled with a dark chuckle. “But honestly, I picked it because religious studies happened when Father Walters taught geometry. It meant that I got someone else. Sister Rossi rapped my knuckles with that damn ruler at least once a week my entire eighth grade year, but I never had to do anything I didn’t want with her other than geometry. 

“And I never told anyone Steve. Not a soul. My parents still don’t know. I thought it didn’t matter until I started public school and there were girls. I mean I’ve always been into guys and girls alike, but after everything girls seemed safer so I narrowed my sights. There was this gorgeous girl in my homeroom class, Laurie Martinelli. We went on a couple of dates. Her parents were out of town one weekend so I went to her house. We raided the liquor cabinet and got a little drunk and headed up to her room. We turned out the lights and started in with the undignified fumblings, like teenagers do. We couldn’t have been at it for more than a minute before I had a panic attack. I managed to get something out about ‘not being ready’ or whatever, grabbed my clothes, and got out of there. The next week at school, everyone was talking about how Danny Williams was a faggot and couldn’t get it up for the girls. I stayed away from relationships entirely after that.

“I thought that avoiding sex would fix it, you know? And I mean if you count not having any more panic attacks, I guess it did. But when I took my first call to a child rape case, it turned out that I hadn’t really fixed anything, just avoided it. I was still riding with Peterson at the time. I saw the kid, she was maybe eleven, so my age when it happened to me, and I had a panic attack. Peterson sent me back to the car to wait it out and got the kid a bus while he took witness statements. When he came back to the car he asks what happened and all I could get out was ‘I was raised Catholic,’ like that somehow explained it. Keep in mind this was before all the scandals broke, but he just looks at me and nods. ‘So was I,’ he says. He told me that I had to get a therapist and work my shit out or I couldn’t do the job. So I did.

“I did therapy for five years, Steve. And it was fucking tough. But I got where I wanted to be. And when the scandal finally broke a few years back, I actually testified against the bastard in court. I went in uniform and told them in explicit detail what he did to me. Without going to therapy for all those years I couldn’t have even described it to myself, much less to a room of strangers.

“I mean, I don’t know if any of this is remotely helpful, but I’m just saying I know how hard this hits. It’s not like a beating or getting shot. It’s something very, very different, and if you were expecting it to be like garden-variety torture recovery, it’s gotta be a shock. But I am here for you, Steve. I will help you get through this however you need.”

Danny stopped and the silence felt rather abrupt, but next to him Steve sniffled again. He looked over to see Steve with tears running down his face and dripping off his chin. 

“I’m sorry, Danny. I didn’t know,” he said.

Danny nodded and shrugged. “Never told you. How would you know?”

“I don’t know. Explains a lot though.”

Danny nodded and took another sip of his beer. “I know I’m overprotective of Grace by most people’s standards. Most people can fuck off though.”

Steve chuckled wetly and Danny smiled. 

“Come on. Let’s finish these beers and hit the sack. We’re both exhausted. We can sort everything else out tomorrow,” Danny suggested.

Steve nodded and swallowed hard. “Sounds good,” he rasped out, voice croaky from his quiet tears.

They threw back the remainders of their beers and dropped the empty bottles in the recycling bin on their way through the kitchen. Danny held Steve’s hand in his until they got to the stairs. They padded softly into the bedroom and Danny flicked on the closet light, leaving the door cracked enough to dimly illuminate the room. 

“I don’t need a nightlight, Danny,” Steve said sounding somewhat affronted by the potential implications.

“Who said it was for you? I slept with the TV on since seventh grade until I started sleeping in the bed with Rachel, and when we split-”

“You started doing it again, until you started sleeping in the bed with me,” Steve finished. 

Danny’s lips bunched up and he nodded. “Yeah, some nights I need a nightlight. No shame in that. We are where we are with this shit, Steve.”

He flopped gracelessly into the bed and patted the mattress next to him. “Come on, babe. We both need some sleep.”

Steve followed almost mechanically, but when Danny pulled him close he melted into the embrace. Danny actually felt entirely ashamed of sleeping with the TV or needing a nightlight as a grown man in his thirties, but Steve needed him to be okay with being fucked up, Steve needed Danny to not be ashamed of what happened, even if he still was. His choice not to tell anyone had partly been because of his innate sense of privacy, and partly due to not wanting to be that cop — the one who did the job to fix his own demons, the one people pitied — but a large part of it had always been shame and vulnerability. And he worked at it in therapy, really he did. In time it had gotten better, but he’d also never had cause to deal with it around other people. Maybe not talking about it helped give the shame a fertile place to grow. But all he knew right then was that he had no business telling Steve, at least not now, that twenty-some-odd years later he was still struggling to feel like he didn’t have something to hide some days. 

But saying it out loud, telling Steve, some of it really felt like it might be the case. He really felt like maybe there was nothing to be ashamed of, at least not in that brief moment. He pulled Steve tighter against him and felt the slight hitch in his breathing. This was going to be a long road, Danny knew, but damned if he would let Steve walk it alone like he had done for so many years.


End file.
